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Even amid best-laid plans, surprises can be pleasant
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Published: March 23, 2008
SAN DIEGO -- When you're away from home on a vacation, surprises can be good, or they can be bad. On our Southern California trip that stretched over last weekend, the surprises were mostly good ones. Some were enlightening, even heartening.
When my husband and I learned that our son would be spending spring break in San Diego, training for and then competing in a college track meet, we perked up. With our children nearly 12 years apart and my husband a teacher and then administrator, we'd been too tied to the public-school schedule ever to take a late-winter vacation. For years, we'd thought longingly how nice it would be to spend a few days somewhere warm and sunny when it was still cold and nasty in the hills of North Carolina.
So a chance to see the kid compete in San Diego in mid-March seemed the perfect excuse to fulfill that dream. Having traveled to other California cities in the past, we thought we had a pretty good idea of what to dread and what to look forward to. In the dread category, we placed problematic if not downright agonizing airport and airline experiences, possibly to include hassles with security and lost luggage. Dealing with the San Diego airport for the flight home would no doubt be a major challenge, we were sure. And we fully expected traffic in the San Diego area to be terrifying. We had visions of vast freeways crammed with speeding cars operated by crazed, angry drivers.
Here's where the good surprises started: The flights both ways were on time, uneventful, even pleasant. Our luggage went where we went. Getting through security in San Diego was a breeze, much easier than it had been in North Carolina. Dealing with the rental car couldn't have been more painless.
Even more amazing, negotiating traffic everywhere in the San Diego area was a pleasure. The only problem came the day when the bridge back from the Naval base on Coronado Island was blocked by an overturned tractor-trailer, but that led us to take the longer way around, down the peninsula, and see even more beaches, palm trees and flower-bedecked neighborhoods.
It wasn't just when it came to problems that we thought we knew what to expect. We also thought we had a good handle on what we would enjoy. Spending time with our son and some of his teammates was high on the list. So was cheering the team on at the track meet (and watching them win). So were seeing tourist attractions and sampling fresh local seafood and close-to-the border Mexican cuisine. And there would be the warm, sunny California weather, of course.
Most of that lived up to expectations. The good surprises were that there was so much more to enjoy than we had anticipated.
At first, one of the unexpected developments worried us. Apparently, spring break for a lot of schoolchildren in the Southwest comes earlier than it does for those in North Carolina. We arrived at our hotel late Wednesday night, when most people were asleep.
But by the time we hit the breakfast room on Thursday morning, the place was swarming with children. Babies, toddlers, elementary- and middle-school-age kids were everywhere. Oh, no, we thought. This is going to be a long, noisy vacation.
But the children were remarkably well behaved. In the afternoons and early evenings, they'd be playing in and around the heated pool, under the close eyes of their parents. At night, they apparently went to sleep. We didn't hear any running, jumping or shrieking.
A lot of those families were Latino. And that led us to register another pleasant surprise: Wherever we went, the people we too often think of as separate groups-- racial, ethnic, "communities," whatever euphemism we use for our differences back home -- seemed to be unselfconsciously mingling in San Diego.
At Seaworld, at the zoo, downtown, at restaurants, at the beach -- brown, white and black people moved among each other as just people. They weren't self-separated into suspicious enclaves.
One afternoon at the hotel, a gaggle of boys of various hues played a spirited game of soccer in the parking lot. When another boy came by with an American football, that became a part of the game, too. The manager of the hotel might be Latino, and the maintenance man might be white. Or vice versa. Stereotypes seemed to have broken down.
I'm no Pollyanna. I know things aren't perfect in San Diego and elsewhere in the Southwest. I know that illegal immigration, in particular, is a terrible problem, as are gangs and drug trafficking. Despite all that, in an area where Latinos have been moving into the United States for a long time and where many Latino families have been citizens for generations, a majority of people seem to have worked past many of the divisions and prejudices that loom so large in North Carolina.
Maybe the laidback feeling in San Diego is what we Tarheels have to look forward to as our newer immigrants settle in.
So much for the good surprises. There was one letdown: Thursday we walked on the beach in the sun, but then it got colder every day. We shivered in the chill wind off the Pacific while watching the track meet Saturday. That night, it hailed and even snowed in parts of San Diego County.
It was warmer in North Carolina than it was at our dream vacation destination.
n Linda Brinson is the Journal's editorial-page editor. She can be reached at lbrinson@wsjournal.com.
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